NAFTA a timely topic at A&M beef conference

COLLEGE STATION — A top cattle industry official on Monday voiced optimism about the North American Free Trade Agreement’s future while not discounting current concerns over the 24-year-old trade deal between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

“When we have all these trade issues, we have retaliation,” Randy Blach, CEO of data aggregator CattleFax, said during the opening day of the Texas A&M Beef Cattle Short Course at Texas A&M University.

“I believe we’re going to get resolution on NAFTA in a year or two,” Blach told a group of about 2,000 agriculture professionals. “ … I’m optimistic that we’ll get some of these (trade disputes) worked out yet this calendar year as we go down the road.”

Tensions have risen between the NAFTA trading partners since President Donald J. Trump imposed steel and aluminum tariffs effective June 1. Canada retaliated by imposing its own tariffs on U.S. imports.

The latest negotiations over NAFTA began in August 2017, but Trump said last month that no deal would be made until after the U.S. midterm elections in November.

Blach cited CattleFax data that show a third of U.S. protein exports over the past five years went to Canada and Mexico.

“This is the key export markets that we’ve got to continue to have access to in order to have our markets move forward,” Blach said. “This has been a strong, strong trend over the last three years.”

He also noted that the United States imports more beef from Canada and Mexico than it exports to them.

“NAFTA has been wonderful for us in our agricultural markets,” he said. “NAFTA is not a big deal on beef. Straight up.”

Texas A&M Beef Cattle Short Course draws thousands

More than 2,000 ranchers and agriculture professionals from across the United States and at least six other countries gathered in College Station this week for the annual Texas A&M Beef Cattle Short Course.

The four-day event featured large group general session lectures and conversations, breakout seminars and live demonstrations of a variety of skills and trades, including cattle handling and beef carcass value determinations.

The short course at A&M dates back to the early 1940s and is today the largest gathering of its kind in the country. The event also included a trade show, a reflection on Hurricane Harvey’s impact on the industry and a two-part introduction to producing cattle. The short course is hosted by the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service and the department of animal science.

“It’s one of the signature educational events of the year, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s certainly one where Texas A&M is on stage,” AgriLife spokesman Blair Fannin said.

Short course coordinator Jason Cleere said that while the majority of attendees were Texans, ranchers from Oklahoma, Arkansas and as far away as Rhode Island also made the trip. Cleere, an AgriLife beef cattle specialist, just finished his 14th year as the event’s lead planner.

“People come to the short course first and foremost for the education and sessions, and then the trade show and the meals help add atmosphere and fellowship for the event,” Cleere said.

Cleere explained that he and other specialists planned the dozens of workshop sessions after consulting with a variety of agriculture professionals in and outside of Texas. He said a landowner legal rights session by AgriLife Extension legal specialist Tiffany Dowell Lashmet was among the most popular breakout panels. Lashmet guided attendees with advice and information regarding liability, leasing property to guests and on-property accidents, according to Cleere.

Cleere and Fannin said the Texas Aggie Prime Rib Dinner — at which “we fed over 1,800 people in 40 minutes,” according to Cleese — was another highlight. Fannin also lifted up the “tremendous spillover” economic impact of the thousands of attendees spending money on lodging and food in Bryan-College Station.

Cleere said he hopes people understand that ranchers are businessmen and businesswomen who “are making business decisions every day.” He said sees the short course as a vital yearly way to assist ranchers in their work, which culminates in providing food to the public.

Fannin said the event also serves as a way for “Texas cattlemen and women to network, share their day-to-day activities and learn from each other.” Most of the events were on campus in the Memorial Student Center or Rudder Tower, with the Wednesday demonstrations hosted by a number of department sites.

The event’s general sessions were spaces for industry experts to weigh in on large-scale issues. On Monday, Randy Blach, chief executive officer of the Denver area-based beef industry data collector CattleFax, said he was “optimistic” about the future of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Blach and other industry experts talked at length about the beef industry’s short- and long-term prospects both in the U.S. and abroad.

“I believe we’re going to get resolution on NAFTA in a year or two,” Blach said Monday. “… I’m optimistic that we’ll get some of these [trade disputes] worked out yet this calendar year as we go down the road,” he said of the 24-year-old trade deal between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

“We will have record meat consumption in 2019 in the U.S.,” Blach said. “Never in our history have we consumed more red meat, pork and poultry than we are now. People are eating livestock protein.”

Blach said the U.S. exports 17 billion pounds of beef worth $18 billion. “That’s $365 in value of the calf you are producing,” he said. “We’ve really got to keep an eye on these trade situations.”

Cleere and Kelley Sullivan, co-owner of Santa Rosa Ranch in Navasota and Crockett, discussed China markets and their potential after being part of recent visits to China and Japan. Cleere and Sullivan are on the Texas Beef Council board of directors and traveled to learn more about opportunities in trade and share educational programming with representatives in those countries.

Sullivan touted the value of undesirable beef carcass parts in U.S. that are in great demand in Japan and other parts of the world.

“About $165 to $170 of the check you get from the sale of a calf comes from that export market,” Sullivan said. “Where that’s coming from are the parts we don’t like, such as beef tongue. In the U.S. we pay $1 a pound, in Japan, $6 a pound. Beef intestine, in the U.S. there’s zero value, but it’s $1.50 a pound in Japan. It’s critical to have those export markets.”

Cleere said the planning group was already working on next year’s short course, which will again be in College Station on Aug. 5-7, 2019.

“For me, it’s always exciting to see people all over the state and country come together. … AgriLife Extension puts on a great program,” he said.

Donnell Brown of RA Brown Ranch in Throckmorton said at the event, “What I love about the short course is we learn so many things about specific areas from cattle marketing, to ranch management, grass management, better care for our cattle and genetic improvement. … And best of all, you see so many good people — another record crowd this year. It’s always good to be together again with cattlemen from all over the country.”

Drones can help farmers grow better crops

HOUSTON — The tools available for farming have come a long way since Dale Cope was a boy.

“One of my chores for my parents is to go weed the garden with a hoe. Now, I’m not going to send a hoe out there, I’m going to fly out there with my drone, and I’m going to take care of the weeds that way,” said Cope, associate professor of practice, Texas A&M Department of Mechanical Engineering.

He and a team of researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, are studying how unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, can be used in agriculture to help farmers. Researchers said within the next 10 years, drones can become an important tool in precision agriculture for farmers around the world.

“You can know where to apply pesticides, fungicides (and) fertilizer in specific areas of the field instead of doing the entire field,” said Cope.

Conventionally, crop consultants would walk the fields looking for problematic weeds, insects and diseases, which is time-consuming, expensive and not completely accurate.

“If drones can be employed, it would save a lot of time. It would be a lot more effective and accurate,” said Muthu Bagavathiannan, weed science researcher and Texas A&M Department of Soil and Crop Sciences assistant professor.

Multiple applications
Drones with various sensors can fly over a field to provide researchers with data that will help them identify problem areas, as well as crops that are doing well.

“We can look at spectral characteristics like the greenness of the plant. I think everybody’s seen where if you fertilize a plant, it greens up. It looks better,” said Seth Murray, corn breeding expert and Texas A&M Department of Soil and Crop Sciences associate professor.

Murray is looking at how drones can help breed better agricultural products, especially corn, so farmers can get better economic value for what they produce.

“What it’s [drones] really doing is giving us a new way to estimate yield and to figure out which plants are best,” Murray said.

Researchers are also looking at how drones can help control problematic weeds.

“A lot of the problems we run into these days are herbicide-resistant weeds, as well as weeds that typically escape control measures and become a problem in future years,” explained Muthu Bagavathiannan.

Instead of spraying the entire field with chemicals against herbicide-resistant weeds, drones could be used to spray weeds for a more targeted approach.

“We’re trying to figure out whether our efficacy of those herbicides, by using drones, would be equal to the backpack sprayers or the tractor or other automatic sprayer systems,” said Vijay Singh, Texas A&M University Department of Soil and Crop Sciences assistant research scientist.

Researchers said it may take several years before easy-to-use software will be available to help farmers get and analyze high-quality data from drone sensors that can be used for applications such as plant breeding or making decisions on when they should spray their crop.

In the meantime, researchers say even at a basic level, drones can allow anyone with a smartphone to record videos and take photographs to monitor large and small farms.